Nearly every piece of information generated today is captured in electronic format. Businesses record information with respect to operating their businesses and actions of their customers. Enterprises record internal activities in a variety of electronic formats. Even individuals and their thoughts and opinions are now captured on a variety of social networking sites or captured via text messages on their smart phones. In fact, very little information exists in today's world that is not in some form captured at some point in its existence in electronic format.
Because of this scenario, search engines are now big business. For example, GOOGLE™ is one of the most successful companies of today and its primary benefit and focus is searching through a sea of electronic information to return relevant results quickly to a user. The speed with which GOOGLE™ grew to its present size is astonishing and mind boggling.
Yet, companies, such as GOOGLE™ and others have largely focuses on indexing and organizing information to improve search results and the response times to searches. Very little effort has been made to keep and maintain linkages between related content for purposes of content tracing.
Furthermore, with the explosion of this digital information and multiple copies and derivatives of that information, which is generated and transferred into multiple places nearly instantaneously around the globe, it is very difficult to trace the origin of a particular piece of information. Because of this, it becomes very difficult to: consolidate similar information, find the latest information in a related set of documents, find out how a particular document has derived content from another, etc.